The Bradbury Chronicles

by Sam Weller

  To this day, Serling and Bradbury fans disagree over what truly occurred. Serling’s supporters maintain that the similarities between Ray’s stories and The Twilight Zone episodes he claims were plagiarized are nothing more than tenuous at best. There is the theory that Ray Bradbury, the recognized master of dark fantasy, was having trouble getting his scripts produced while younger writers, some of them friends of Ray’s, were having great success with the program. Some theorize that this upset Ray’s ego. Ray’s fans see otherwise. Ray, when asked how to counter the naysayers, pointed back to the conversation he had with Serling after the airing of The Twilight Zone pilot: Serling admitted that he had inadvertently stolen from The Martian Chronicles and offered to pay Ray for rights.

  WHEN OSCAR nominations were handed out for 1962, Icarus Montgolfier Wright, the film Ray cowrote with George Clayton Johnson, was named to the list for best animated short subject. Ultimately, the film lost to The Hole, a short film about two New York construction workers pondering the subject of nuclear proliferation.

  BECAUSE RAY was an efficient creator, he was able to work on several projects simultaneously and still have time for his wife and children. As Maggie adored warm weather, the Bradburys took their annual summer vacations on Coronado Island, near San Diego, where they stayed at the Hotel Del Coronado, an old, opulent Victorian retreat. The four blond Bradbury girls loved running barefoot across the warm white sand beaches, across the dew-covered patches of Bermuda grass that surrounded the hotel, and under the shadows of the dozens of palm trees on the property. These were unforgettable days, filled with laughter and a robust sense of family. Ray was an energetic, doting father, even if he left most daily parenting responsibilities to Maggie.

  Halloween was always another special time in the Bradbury house. Ever since he was eight years old, Ray had loved it. His aunt Neva would often pile him and his brother, Skip, into her Tin Lizzie, a Model T Ford. With Neva behind the wheel and the two boys in the backseat, the car would rumble west of Waukegan into farm country. The trio would collect pumpkins and sheaves of corn from the October fields and come home to decorate Ray’s grandparents’ house. Indeed, Halloween was almost better than Christmas in many ways in the Bradbury house, and because Susan’s birthday was on November 5, Ray and Maggie often combined the two events, throwing boisterous parties with a Halloween theme in her honor. Ray would also take his daughters out trick-or-treating, frequently donning a mask of his own. They would tirelessly roam their neighborhood, occasionally knocking on a door of a Hollywood celebrity like Barbara Billingsley, the mother in the television program Leave It to Beaver. The morning after Halloween, the girls would often find that their father had raided their candy stashes, absconding with his favorites.

  More than anything, Ray loved taking his girls to the movies. They watched everything: Westerns, Saturday matinee horror films, Japanese movies with badly dubbed dialogue (Ray was especially fond of the films of director Akira Kurosawa). They saw House of Wax at Graumann’s Chinese Theater; One Million Years at the Picwood; Camelot at the Cinerama Dome. “Often after,” remembered Bettina Bradbury, “we would go out for ice cream at Baskin-Robbins or hit one of the magazine stands in Hollywood and Dad would let me buy all the Archie and Little Lotta comics I wanted. We’d ride home in a yellow cab and I remember leaning on his shoulder and thinking to myself: Life doesn’t get much better than this.”

  The taxicab was a ubiquitous fixture of growing up a Bradbury. On days when Maggie could not drive the girls to school, Ray called for a cab and rode with his daughters. Embarrassed, the girls demanded to be dropped off blocks from school so that classmates did not see their mode of transportation.

  One afternoon in the early 1960s, Ray was walking his daughters down Hollywood Boulevard when they passed a magic shop; through the storefront window Ray spotted a ghost from his past—Blackstone the Magician. The Bradbury girls were, of course, well familiar with Blackstone, having heard bedtime stories of their father’s fictional childhood adventures with the magician. But the girls believed the stories to be true, and so Ray told them to wait outside the magic shop for a moment. He walked in and approached the nearly eighty-year-old magician.

  “Mr. Blackstone,” Ray said, “the last time we met was when I stumbled onstage at the Orpheum Theatre in 1937, to help you with your canary cage. My daughters think I know you better than I really do, because I’ve told them stories about you for the last two thousand nights. Can I bring them in?”

  Blackstone laughed and said of course, but before Ray ushered his girls inside, the old magician asked Ray his name. Ray then shepherded the girls into the magic shop.

  “Ray!” cried Blackstone. “It’s been so long! Great to see you again!” The Bradbury girls were awestruck. For the next thirty minutes, they watched with wonder as the elderly illusionist vanished cards and made handkerchiefs dance on air.

  While it couldn’t have been easy for Maggie to have a husband running wild with much the same mind-set as the children, in her later years, she was always very proud of her husband’s relationship with their daughters. “Ray was a terrific father and the girls just adored him,” Maggie said.

  RAY PREPARED another short-story collection for release in February 1964. The Machineries of Joy, published by Simon & Schuster, featured twenty-one stories, including “Death and the Maiden,” as well as “To the Chicago Abyss,” “Tyrannosaurus Rex,” and the Ireland-inspired tales “The Beggar at O’Connell Bridge” and “The Anthem Sprinters.”

  In April, the 1964 World’s Fair opened to much fanfare. The theme of the global celebration was the Space Age. The slogan of the fair was “Man in a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe.” The fair featured 140 pavilions, built on the site of the 1939 celebration in Flushing Meadows, New York. For the grand opening, Ray traveled once again across the country by passenger train. This time, his two youngest daughters, Bettina and Alexandra, accompanied him. Maggie would join them later, choosing to fly with Susan and Ramona. One night, as the train sped through the woods of Pennsylvania, Ray looked out the window and couldn’t believe his eyes. Beyond the window was a solid river of flowing green phosphor, moving, twisting, headed somewhere, nowhere, anywhere far into the night. It was a river of hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of fireflies. He shook Tina and Zana awake.

  “Girls, you have to see this,” he said.

  The sleepy little girls in their pajamas rubbed sleep from their eyes and looked out the window.

  “I was just five, but I still remember it clearly,” said Alexandra Bradbury. “There must have been millions of fireflies. How could you forget something like that? It was just amazing.” It was a special, beautiful memory for father and daughters.

  At the fair, the family was reunited. Stan Freberg, the popular satirist, whom Ray had met two years earlier at a Hollywood party, also met up with the family. Ray and Freberg had become fast friends and would remain so for the rest of their days.

  While the World’s Fair, with all of its technology and gleaming architecture of the future, was wondrous to behold, in Ray’s estimation nothing would ever compare to the late-night light show provided by a sea of fireflies somewhere in Pennsylvania.

  SHORT STORIES. Novels. Radio. Television. Movies. Comic books. Animated films. World’s Fair exhibits. What was left to do?

  Theater.

  Ray’s relationship with the theater world had begun on a Tucson, Arizona, school stage in 1932 when he was twelve. That was when Ray realized that he loved the glare of the spotlight. From that point forward, he was as comfortable in front of an audience as he was in front of his typewriter—a natural-born ham, as he would describe himself. In 1939, he had barnstormed his way into Laraine Day’s theater group, the Wilshire Players, and his love of theater deepened.

  Ray’s next venture into the theater began in the summer of 1955, when Broadway producer Paul Gregory and actor Charles Laughton approached him to write a stage version of Fahrenheit 451. Ray was a big Laughton
fan, and was eager to tackle writing for the stage, but by year’s end, with a completed script in hand, Gregory and Laughton took their writer for drinks with some bad news. With Ray sufficiently liquored up, the two men kindly informed him that the Fahrenheit 451 script was dreadful. Ray, musing years later, felt that he adapted the book too literally for the stage, and it obviously failed. However, Ray had forged a close friendship with Charles Laughton, one that would continue until the actor’s death in 1962.

  A few years later, Ray decided to try writing for the stage again, this time adapting his Irish stories into one-act plays. He wrote “The First Night of Lent,” a story of the Irish cabdriver who drove him between Dublin and Kilcock as he was writing the Moby Dick screenplay. Ray also drafted “The Anthem Sprinters,” about the Irish who, under British rule, madly flee movie theaters at the ends of films before the English national anthem strikes up. In 1959, Ray’s friend writer and producer Sy Gomberg approached Ray about the scripts. Gomberg invited him over to his house for an informal reading, to see if Ray’s new theatrical endeavors were any good. When Ray arrived at Gomberg’s home, actors James Whitmore (who had acted in Ray’s first radio drama, “The Meadow”), Strother Martin, and a few others were there to read Ray’s scripts. If these fine actors, who were reading his work for the first time, could not make the plays sound good, they would all know it immediately. To Ray’s amazement, as the actors who had gathered in Gomberg’s living room started to read his plays, the group was laughing and having a grand time. Ray’s confidence soared, and he continued to write the occasional play. Whitmore reprised his radio role in “The Meadow,” as part of three one-act plays titled Three for Today, staged at the Huntington Hartford Theatre, a small space in Hollywood.

  Ray held more informal readings with local actors and friends, and he joined an amateur theater group that convened at the Desilu Theater, owned by Lucille Ball. As Ray remembered it, Ball rented the space to the theater group free of charge. Ray had recently written an adaptation of his “The Pedestrian,” but the group found the script a difficult one to bring to the stage. The task was given to a young actor/director named Charles Rome Smith, an original cast member during the seven-year Broadway run of the popular show The Threepenny Opera. Smith knew Ray’s work and accepted the challenge. In June 1963, the group staged a run-through of “The Pedestrian,” and Ray loved it. More important, he loved that Smith hadn’t flinched from adapting work that had been deemed difficult to stage. Ray and Smith staged more of his plays at Desilu. And then, in 1964, they decided to form a partnership, The Pandemonium Theatre Company. Ray would fund the operation and write all the plays, and Smith would serve as producer and director. By October 1964, they had leased the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles and opened The World of Ray Bradbury, which included dramatizations of “The Veldt,” “The Pedestrian,” and “To the Chicago Abyss.” The play premiered on October 8 and received resounding reviews by local theater critics. It was the beginning of The Pandemonium Theatre Company, a passion of Ray’s for the rest of his life. It was also the beginning of a close friendship and partnership with Smith, who would continue to direct many of Ray’s plays over the course of the coming decades.

  THE 1964 CHRISTMAS holiday season was in full swing in Beverly Hills—palm trees and twinkling lights, Santa Claus and Santa Ana winds—and Ray was shopping for gifts for his family. He was cutting through a department store crowd when, through the hustle and bustle, he saw Walt Disney. To Ray it was as if, for a brief moment, time slowly ground to a halt; he considered Disney to be one of the great imaginative men of the twentieth century. In 1929, seeing The Skeleton Dance at the Genesee Theater in Waukegan, Ray had marveled at Disney’s talent. Then, in the summer of 1940, Ray’s opinion of Disney was magnified tenfold when he and Neva saw Fantasia, a film that would be counted as one of his favorites.

  Disney was holding boxes of Christmas gifts, one stacked upon another, piled up to his chin. He was dressed, as ever, in a classic 1960s tailored suit and skinny tie and sported his famous pencil-thin mustache.

  Ray rushed up to him to introduce himself.

  “I know your books,” Disney responded, matter-of-factly. Ray was thunderstruck. Walt Disney knew his work!

  “Thank God,” Ray said, finally.

  “Why?” Disney said.

  “Because,” Ray replied, “someday soon I want to take you to lunch.”

  Disney smiled. “Tomorrow?” he offered.

  The next day, Ray visited Walt Disney’s office at the Disney studio in Burbank. For a child of imagination, nurtured in part by the animated films of Walt Disney, it was like visiting Saint Nick at the North Pole. At Disney’s office, the keeper of the gate, his secretary, gave Ray a stern warning. Ray had one hour, after which he had to leave. Disney was a busy man and there would be no monopolizing his time. The first meeting between Ray Bradbury and Walt Disney was wonderfully understated—soup and sandwiches served atop a card table in Walt’s office. The two men talked about their work, their ideas, and then discovered that they shared a common sorrow. In discussing the history of world’s fairs (just like Ray, Disney had contributed to the 1964 fair), they both lamented the tragic, even ridiculous fact that when these global celebrations closed, all the wonderful buildings, all the architecture of tomorrow, all the pavilions, transports, amusement rides—everything—was demolished. Walt Disney had an idea for a cure to this pain that he shared with Ray: a year-round world’s fair that, once built, would never be torn down. (To the contrary, it would never be completed.) Ray loved the idea. But for Walt Disney, it was a long way from becoming a reality. His concept of a year-round world’s fair was, at this juncture, still just a vision. When realized, it would feature all sorts of pavilions, fusing education and entertainment, and comprise exhibits from cultures spanning the globe. This grand dream of Walt Disney’s would be called the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow: EPCOT.

  When Ray’s hour was up, he stood, ready to leave, but Disney said, “Wait! I have something to show you.” Disney took Ray out to the studio lot, and gave him a walking tour. Inside a vast workshop, he showed Ray a series of unrecognizable spare robot parts, built for a display that would feature the world’s first audioanimatron, a perfect, fully functioning likeness of Abraham Lincoln that could sit, stand, and speak. Of course this concept sent Ray’s imagination into hyperdrive. He wondered aloud what would happen if an assassin came in and murdered the robotic Abraham Lincoln. Disney liked Ray’s idea so much that he told him to go home and write a short story, right away. (Ray did just that; the result was “Downwind from Gettysburg.”)

  By the time the tour was over, Ray had stayed with Disney well beyond the time allotted him by the secretary. She looked at Ray accusingly, tapping her wrist. Ray pointed at Disney and cried, “He did it!” It was an incredible afternoon. After all, it was not every day one is given a personal tour of the Disney studio by none other than Walter Elias Disney himself.

  Ray never visited Disney at home, and they never met socially. But every so often, the two men got together for a meeting of their mutual admiration society. In what would be one of their last lunches together, Disney expressed his gratitude to his comrade-in-all-things-fantastic. Sitting at the card table in his office, Disney leaned forward and asked if he could do anything for Ray. Ray only hesitated for a moment. He knew what he wanted: an original piece of Disney memorabilia. When he asked Disney to “open the vaults,” Disney certainly did, for Ray left the studio that afternoon with an armful of original animation cels—frame-by-frame paintings from some of Disney’s greatest cinematic achievements, including Dumbo, Bambi, and Sleeping Beauty. In the mid-1960s, there was certainly no market for animation cels; very few people cared about them. Ray Bradbury did, not for their monetary value, but out of love for Walt Disney and his genius. The two men remained friends until Disney’s death on December 15, 1966.

  Many decades later, in the living room of the Bradbury house in Cheviot Hills, one of Ray’s fr
amed acetate cels rests on a bookcase shelf. It is a beautiful painting, rendered on clear acetate, with Walt Disney’s stamp of approval visible in the lower right-hand corner. It depicts a timeless scene from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the moment the wicked stepmother hands the poison apple to Snow White.

  ON THURSDAY, January 13, 1966, production began on François Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. The French director had purchased the rights to the Bradbury novel four years earlier, on July 19, 1962. It would be the director’s first English-language picture, his first color film, and it would star Oskar Werner and Julie Christie. Briefly, Paul Newman had agreed to play fireman Guy Montag, but the star, citing “creative differences,” withdrew from the project; he felt that the novel’s social and political commentary should have been heightened in the screenplay.

  Truffaut had initially considered changing the title from Fahrenheit 451 to Phoenix, to give it a more international appeal, but in the end he remained faithful to Ray’s title. From the beginning, it was a troubled and difficult project. Due to the exorbitant costs required to make a film of this nature, there were at least six producers attached to the film before it finally got made. Four screenwriters wrote four different drafts of screenplays. Casting disagreements persisted throughout the planning of the film. For a time, Terence Stamp was set to play Montag, with Jane Fonda as Montag’s wife; both Max von Sydow and Peter O’Toole were considered for the role of Captain Beatty.

  Truffaut decided to cast actress Julie Christie in the dual roles of Clarisse McClellan and Montag’s wife, Mildred (renamed Linda for the film). “Using Julie Christie,” the director wrote in a letter to actor Terence Stamp, “allows me to solve the eternal problem of the thankless part versus the glamorous part, show two aspects of the same woman, and also prove visually that for most men, wife and mistress are the same.” It was a risky artistic decision, one that Ray Bradbury criticized later on. “Clarisse needed to be much younger,” Ray said, adding that the casting was just plain confusing. Furthermore, Truffaut’s interpretation of Clarisse McClellan was far from the author’s. Truffaut envisioned the character of Clarisse as being older and more seductive, which irked Ray, who never intended any sexual tension between his characters Clarisse and Montag.