by Sam Weller
Ray managed to move his father to Santa Monica Hospital, but two days later, Leo suffered a massive stroke. After this, Ray visited his father twice a day, every day, for two weeks. Each time, Ray told him that he loved him. But Leo never recovered. On October 20, 1957, he passed away.
The funeral for Leonard Spaulding Bradbury was held two days after his death, at the Kingsley and Gates Funeral Home in Santa Monica. This devastating day for Ray was made heartwarming only by a huge turnout of Leonard Bradbury’s coworkers, people Ray had never known. “I never knew so many people cared about my dad,” he said.
After Leonard Bradbury was buried, Ray set out to salvage his disintegrating marriage. He still claimed to be befuddled by Maggie’s unhappiness and dissatisfaction. He went to Maggie the only way he knew: “I suppose I just cried,” Ray recalled. It worked. Maggie agreed to stay, “like so many spouses do,” said Ray, “for the children.”
21. SOMETHING WICKED
When I visit schools, kids always ask me, “What’s the scariest book you’ve ever read?” and I always tell them Something Wicked This Way Comes. I still remember how creepy it was. It really struck a chord with me.
—R. L. STINE, author
DESPITE FISSURES in their marriage, Bradbury baby number four—Alexandra Allison—arrived on August 13, 1958. Like her three elder siblings, “Zana,” as friends and family called her, did not share the supranatal proclivity of her father; none of the Bradbury girls recalled their own births.
The ranch house at 10750 Clarkson Road was now too small for the family, prompting Ray and Maggie to look for a new home. The first place the couple saw was a sprawling three-bedroom house, not far from where they had been living, in the Cheviot Hills enclave of West Los Angeles. Cheviot Hills was, and remains, a junior Beverly Hills; the houses are not nearly as ostentatiously large, but still reasonably sized by Los Angeles standards. The streets are rolling, with well-manicured lawns fringing the sidewalks; and rows of mature palm trees reach to the sky. Ray and Maggie loved the split-level stucco house, which had been built in 1937. It was nestled into a cozy embankment of grass and tall green shrubbery. It had an attached garage beneath the kitchen and, most important for Ray, it had a basement where he could put his office. The Bradburys found the sliver of a backyard perfectly charming; it was just big enough for Ray and the girls to play badminton at twilight—one of the family’s favorite nightly rituals. (Many years later, with his daughters grown and out of the house, Ray had the gutters cleaned. When the serviceman climbed onto the roof, he discovered an old badminton birdie among the leaves. Ray noticed the serviceman holding the shuttlecock in his hand, and he told him to return it to its nest. Ever the sentimentalist, Ray wanted to leave the fond memories of nightly badminton games undisturbed. The utility man returned the birdie to the gutter, where it sits to this day.)
Ray and Maggie purchased their new home in the autumn of 1958. They moved in on Thanksgiving Day because, as Maggie said, with her usual sarcasm, “I was trying to get out of cooking Thanksgiving dinner!” It took two moving trucks to relocate all the Bradbury belongings, the first vehicle for furniture, clothes, and household goods. Ray was a packrat; he threw nothing out, and many of the boxes were stuffed with his collection of toys, old autograph books, and movie and theater ticket stubs spanning the decades. A second moving truck was called into duty just for the books. The Bradburys packed things where they could squeeze them. Ray even placed an obstreperous cat into a trash can for the short drive over to the new house. In the new house, Susan and Ramona shared a bedroom, with their own bathroom, while Bettina had her own room on the west side of the house. Baby Alexandra slept with her parents.
Not long after the Bradburys moved into their new home, screenwriter John Gay, who had briefly collaborated with Ray on White Hunter, Black Heart, introduced Ray to his friend Rod Serling. Serling, a three-time Emmy Award–winning writer, was in the midst of developing a new fantasy and science fiction series for CBS. The show’s title was The Twilight Zone.
According to Don Presnell and Marty McGee, authors of A Critical History of Television’s The Twilight Zone, 1959–1964, Serling had “helped define television as a dramatic art form,” beginning with a teleplay that aired on the Kraft Television Theater in January 1955. Some would proffer that Rod Serling was to dramatic television in the 1950s what Norman Corwin was to radio in the 1940s; Serling was known for addressing social issues and writing “serious” stories. And so, when he announced his intentions to develop a dark fantasy television series, it came as a surprise to many. Furthermore, according to Ray Bradbury, Serling was out of his element with a genre television program and he needed help. Soon after meeting Rod Serling, Ray and Maggie attended an awards banquet sponsored by the Writers Guild. Serling was there and he approached Ray, who by 1959 was hailed as one of the undisputed masters of fantasy and science fiction.
“Rod told me that he was starting a fantasy series,” recalled Ray, “but he didn’t really know what he was doing. I invited him over to the house that night.” Serling accepted the invitation and, as Ray recalled it, he took Serling down to his basement office and put a pile of books in his arms, by Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson (both friends and acolytes of Ray’s), Roald Dahl, and John Collier. Ray placed a few of his own books on top for good measure.
“I told Rod,” Ray said, “‘After you read these books you will have a complete idea of what your show should be like. Buy some of these stories or hire some of these authors to work for you, because you can’t do the whole thing by yourself.’” Ray then sent Serling off.
After that, Rod and his wife, Carol, would have Ray and Maggie over for dinner occasionally. As their friendship progressed, Ray agreed to be a regular contributor to Serling’s television program.
Meanwhile, Ray landed a short story in The Best American Short Stories anthology of 1958. “The Day It Rained Forever” would mark his last appearance in the respected literary collection. He had also readied another short-story collection, A Medicine for Melancholy, which featured twenty-two newly collected Bradbury short stories, including such reader favorites as “The Dragon,” “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” “In a Season of Calm Weather,” and the widely anthologized “All Summer in a Day.” The latter story told of a group of vicious schoolchildren on Venus who lock a little girl in a classroom closet just as the sun is preparing to make its brief, once-every-seven-years appearance. “More people ask me about that one story than any other,” Ray said, reflecting on his prolific output of short stories. “That story reveals the dark side in all of us. And it makes us feel ashamed.” Doubleday published A Medicine for Melancholy in February 1959.
At the same time, Ray’s film agents offered him free use of an office space in a gleaming white building located at 9441 Wilshire Boulevard, in Beverly Hills. Ray’s agents were moving to another office, but had prepaid a year’s lease at the Wilshire location. Ray readily accepted the generous offer. Each morning, he took the bus, or a cab, or asked Maggie to drive him to the office (the family had, at long last, given in and bought an aqua blue station wagon). Ray was working diligently on a new novel, and the Wilshire Boulevard office provided him a quiet respite from the tapping of little feet above his basement office at home.
At this time, unbeknownst to Ray, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began looking into his possible involvement with the Communist Party. According to the FBI file, recently declassified through the Freedom of Information Act, the bureau began investigating Ray on April 2, 1959. Over the years, some of Ray’s works—stories in The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, and, of course, Fahrenheit 451—had strong antigovernment overtones; Ray’s public criticism of the House Un-American Activities Committee and of the McCarthy hearings also made him a target. It is worth noting, however, that in the FBI report, the bureau, like many journalists over the years, spelled Ray’s name incorrectly: He is listed as “Raymond” Douglas Bradbury. The FBI’s investigation, which included surveilla
nce of the Bradbury house in Cheviot Hills, combed through Ray’s past, searching for evidence that he was a member of the Communist Party. One anonymous informant advised the investigators that writers such as Ray were reaching a large audience through mass paperbacks and, consequently, were “in a position to spread poison concerning political institutions in general and American institutions in particular.” The report cited several public speeches Ray had delivered in recent years that included comments critical of the U.S. government. It also took note of the November 1952 advertisement decrying the Republican Party that Ray had taken out in the Daily Variety. In the end, while the bureau had suspicions that Ray was a Communist sympathizer, the report concluded that “no evidences have been developed which indicate he was ever a member of the CP.” On June 3, 1959, the FBI closed its case on Ray.
Just a few months later, in the fall of 1959, Rod Serling’s program, The Twilight Zone, premiered on CBS. The pilot episode, “Where Is Everybody?” aired on October 2. The plotline followed a confused astronaut who, after enduring isolation training on Earth in preparation for orbital space flight, finds himself inexplicably wandering through a desolate town, an amnesiac looking for any sign of life or even a sign of his own identity. After watching the program, Ray was shocked. “Where Is Everybody?,” bore an uncanny resemblance, at least in his mind, to one of his own stories, published almost a decade earlier in The Martian Chronicles. In Ray’s tale, “The Silent Towns,” a reclusive man living in the blue hills of Mars emerges from his shack to find the planet completely evacuated. All the recent settlers had rocketed back to Earth to assist in the great atomic war raging back home. As the man walks the desolate streets of a Martian town, he is desperate to learn if he is truly the last person on Mars.
“When I saw the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone,” said Ray, “I thought, ‘That looks a little bit like a story from The Martian Chronicles.’ I didn’t say anything to Rod. I was embarrassed.” He assumed that it was an unintentional lifting of his concept.
A month later, remembered Ray, Rod Serling called him. “He said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ and I said, ‘Tell you what?’” Ray related the phone conversation. “Rod said, ‘That my pilot script was based partially on a story of yours in The Martian Chronicles.’” Serling told Ray that the previous night he had been reading in bed when his wife, Carol, who was immersed in The Martian Chronicles, turned to him and pointed out the similarities between “Where Is Everybody?” and “The Silent Towns.”
According to Ray, Serling admitted over the telephone that he had inadvertently used Ray’s concept—at least in part. He was calling to right the wrong. Ray said that Serling offered to buy the rights to “The Silent Towns,” as an act of good faith. “I told him,” said Ray, “‘The very fact you called me and recognized what happened, that’s it. Let’s let it go.’”
Two weeks later, according to Ray, Serling called him again. “He said, ‘I can’t stand it. I’ve got to buy your story. My lawyers will call you.’ Rod hung up and his lawyers never called,” Ray said. “He shouldn’t have made the second call. He was off the hook. I let him off the hook. And then he called and talked about his lawyers and they never called.”
Shortly thereafter, on October 30, 1959, Ray noticed more narrative similarities to his own work in the fifth episode of The Twilight Zone, “Walking Distance.” The nostalgic story followed a man who travels back in time to visit his childhood town. The story at once evoked the mood and imagery of Dandelion Wine, but, as Twilight Zone aficionados would note, Ray Bradbury does not have a monopoly on tales of nostalgic Americana. The episode even included the mention of a character, “Dr. Bradbury,” an apparent nod of appreciation from Serling. But Ray was frustrated, feeling that Serling was liberally borrowing ideas, themes, and concepts from his canon.
“On one level,” wrote Christopher Conlon in the December 2000–January 2001 issue of Filmfax magazine, “Bradbury’s frustration with what he saw broadcast each week on Twilight Zone is perfectly understandable. The Zone is in fact drenched in Bradburian notions and plot devices, and from the onset Serling himself was well aware of Bradbury’s central place in mid-century fantasy fiction.”
Even so, Ray wrote three teleplays for The Twilight Zone. The first teleplay he submitted to Serling’s Cayuga Productions was an adaptation of his short story “Here There Be Tygers,” first published in the 1951 science fiction anthology New Tales of Space and Time. The story follows a rocket crew to the distant Planet 7 in Star System 84 (a rare instance of a Bradbury story set on a world outside of our own solar system). Planet 7 is Eden in outer space: beautiful, expansive, green, untouched. The rocket crew soon discovers that the planet rewards their respect of its ecology, by fulfilling their every thought: A creek flows with white wine; the wind flies an astronaut like a drifting kite. But when one crew member endeavors to exploit the planet for its rich natural resources, Planet 7, a living, breathing entity, decides to lash out. Thematically, “Here There Be Tygers” was a perfect fit for The Twilight Zone. Serling was intent on his show addressing social issues, and in his teleplay Ray was examining modern ecological concerns (well before the ecology movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s). There was one problem with “Here There Be Tygers.” It would cost too much to produce; consequently, it was rejected.
The next script Ray presented for The Twilight Zone was “A Miracle of Rare Device,” an adaptation of a short story that wouldn’t appear in print for a few more years, in the January 1962 issue of Playboy. This time, Ray’s script sold to The Twilight Zone. The tale followed two drifters, driving through the desert down an Arizona highway, who eye a stunning mirage in the far distance—a city rising out of the shimmering heat and the parched mountains. The two men decide to set up a viewing station, charging passersby twenty-five cents for a glimpse of the uncanny urban mirage. They soon discover that each viewer sees a different city: Paris, New York, Rome, even the mythical city of Xanadu. But one patron sees nothing at all and becomes intent on spoiling this place of vision and imagination for everyone.
“A Miracle of Rare Device” was scheduled for production but was never made. Twilight Zone scholars Presnell and McGee theorize that, once again, production costs likely played a role. The authors also present another theory, quoting Rod Serling: “Ray Bradbury is a very difficult guy to dramatize, because that which reads so beautifully on the printed page doesn’t fit in the mouth—it fits in the head.”
While Ray’s difficulties with The Twilight Zone persisted, he was also, after a decade, seriously contemplating a change of publishers. Over the years, Ray had grown disenchanted with Doubleday, and he was having doubts whether the publisher should get his new book. He was truly fond of his editor, Walter Bradbury, who was instrumental in shaping The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine, but he had never been impressed by Doubleday’s marketing efforts and, as his agent, Don Congdon, complained, the company did not pay enough for Ray’s books. These were the reasons, according to Congdon, that he and Ray were eager to sign a deal with Ian Ballantine for Fahrenheit 451 and The October Country. Ballantine showed enthusiasm and an understanding that Ray’s work far exceeded the science fiction genre.
The space race was blasting off, Sputnik had circled the globe, and it had ignited the collective imagination of people young and old around the world. People dreamed of traveling beyond the boundaries of our own little blue marble. Ray was confounded to learn that in a time when periodicals like Life, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, and Time were all covering space exploration, one of the great paeans to pioneering outer space, The Martian Chronicles, was no longer available. Doubleday had let the book go out of print and Ray was livid. When he raised his grievances, the ever-agreeable Walter Bradbury made haste to put The Martian Chronicles back into print with a new introduction by writer Clifton Fadiman. Walter Bradbury had always tried his best to keep Ray appeased, but he was only one man. In 1959, when Walter Bradbury left Doubleday for an editor’s post at Henr
y Holt and Company, Ray’s relationship with Doubleday, after more than a decade, was in jeopardy. Ray expressed his concerns with his new editor at Doubleday, Tim Seldes, in a letter that reflected his acute awareness of the status of his career and also that of his growing popularity. Ray was lecturing on college campuses, and his work was beginning to be assigned and read in high school literature classes throughout the country. Ray knew full well that he was a name entity for Doubleday, and he took Seldes to task for his company’s lack of support.
… As you know, I’ve been under contract to you people now for 11 years, as of this month. And while Walter Bradbury in his time, and you in yours, have been warmly responsive to my work, I have never felt the same enthusiasm existed throughout the Doubleday organization.
So may I ask this of all of you—some time in the coming four weeks, at an editorial meeting, as a joint effort, I want you to think of my past books and my possible value at Doubleday in the next few years. I think a group decision has to be made now as to whether you find my books lacking and bid me goodbye.
I have felt lonely at Doubleday, and often neglected, and want some of the individual attention and promotion given to other authors at smaller publishing houses. I have waited patiently, these eleven years, for Doubleday to exert influence in my behalf in many places in the book trade where I could use your good offices.
My anxiety and un-ease have increased because of one simple fact: the Space Age is here. And Doubleday, I feel, has yet to realize that they own the leading writer in the field. In colleges and high schools throughout the country my name gets fantastic attention. Operas, one-act plays, and films are being made of my work everywhere. Immodest of me to mention this, but the enthusiasm is there, and must be noted.