by Sam Weller
On an early January morning in 2001, Ray Bradbury was walking slowly up a concrete pathway of his Palm Springs home. He was on a mission. After his stroke, he used a four-pronged cane, but gradually he relied more heavily on the walker he was now using. If he had long walks ahead of him, Ray acquiesced to a wheelchair. Despite these physical hindrances, his spirits were high.
Ray had always approached life in this manner. Though he lamented that his impatience kept him from writing his astounding experiences in a daily journal, a rare diary entry written in 1939, when he was eighteen, confirmed this outlook on life: January 21, Saturday: “It rained glorious rain all day....”
Now, more than sixty years later, when he walked, he chuckled and talked as he dragged his feet behind the walker. He sank his thick fingers into the pocket of his white tennis shorts (a uniform of comfort he began adopting in the early seventies), and withdrew a set of keys. The key chain had attached to it a small pewter fish, a gift from film director John Huston, given in 1953 when Ray was in Ireland working on the Moby Dick screenplay. He unlocked the door. The curtains and shutters were closed. The stout, white-haired man wearing the white tennis shoes, white socks, white shorts, white Oxford shirt, and a tie emblazoned with a colorful pattern of Easter eggs, stood at the doorway and peered into the darkness.
Ray slid his walker down the front hallway and threw wide the white shuttered doors of the coat closet. More boxes, more books, more toys. For a moment, Ray looked about until he located a cardboard box. He moved to a table near the living room, next to a sliding glass door that overlooked the small backyard and the swimming pool, and began to rummage through the box. He took out a stack of old newspaper clippings—yellowed cartoon strips torn from the funny pages of a bygone era. They were from his childhood hometown newspaper, the Waukegan News-Sun; the dates along the top read “1929,” and dozens of clips made up the pile. They were his Buck Rogers comic strips.
As Ray sat gingerly leafing through these old remnants, he grew quiet. He looked at the pieces of newsprint with a bittersweet mix of nostalgia and wonder. He had traveled two hours so that he could find these mementos of his past.
On March 16, 2001, Ray’s beloved aunt Neva died at the age of ninety-two. The great inspirer, “Glinda the Good,” was gone. Ray, Patrick Kachurka, and Neva’s longtime partner, Anne Anthony, were the only ones who gathered for a private memorial service. Neva was laid out peacefully, her long, gray tresses fanning out beneath her. Afterward, Ray arranged to have her remains cremated. When he received the tin with his beloved aunt’s ashes, he placed them on a small card table in his dining room, with two old photographs of Neva placed nearby, alongside a small painting that Neva had done in the 1920s. It was a shrine to the one person who had most profoundly influenced him.
After that, he put together yet another collection of short stories, One More for the Road, published in 2002. His murder mystery, Let’s All Kill Constance, the third book in his mystery-noir trilogy, begun in a hospital bed shortly after his stroke, was released in 2003. That year also, one hundred of his “Most Celebrated Stories” were collected and published with Bradbury Stories. He raced to publish 2004’s The Cat’s Pajamas, another collection of short stories old and new, spanning his entire career.
Though Ray was lecturing occasionally in the Los Angeles area, his primary passion these days had become the theater. His own troupe, the Pandemonium Theatre Company, was mounting several productions a year. As ever, Ray’s longtime theatrical partner, the soft-spoken Charles Rome Smith, handled the director’s duties on the majority of the productions. Ray was still very active, dining regularly with his friends, attempting to eat better, and limiting his drinking to one glass of wine with each meal. And, of course, he spent his mornings writing. Since his strokes, he had tried to type, but he could barely move his left hand. And so in 2001, he took to dictating almost all of his stories by telephone to his daughter Alexandra. It was a difficult way to write, and Ray never quite felt the same rhythm as he had as a prolific and fast typist, but it was his only recourse. On rare occasions, he jotted stories down by hand, usually with a thick Sharpie, or he attempted to type on his trusty Selectric.
Late mornings and afternoons usually consisted of opening mail. Ray received, on average, three hundred letters a week from fans in China, Argentina, Japan, everywhere. He did his best to answer them all. “If it’s a love letter, you have to answer it,” he asserted. By midafternoon, as he had done for his entire life, Ray was napping. A good part of the remainder of the day, postnap, was spent in front of the television with Maggie. They were there, like the majority of the nation, staring in shock as the events of September 11, 2001, unfolded. Ray called the terrorist attacks “the darkest day in American history.” And, ever the oracle, when asked how the world’s problems might be solved, he was quick to insist that everyone was ignoring the real problem, the relationship between Palestine and Israel. “When that is solved, only then will we have real peace,” Ray said.
On Saturday, February 1, 2003, he and Maggie were watching television, as usual, when reports of the space shuttle Columbia burning up on reentry, killing the seven astronauts on board, aired on all the news channels. Ray was sitting in much the same spot as he had been, thirty-six years earlier, watching in horror the coverage of the Apollo 1 tragedy. As the Columbia space shuttle debris streaked across the blue Texas sky, Ray sat in disbelief. This tragedy was eerily reminiscent of his own story “Kaleidoscope,” in which an astronaut, falling from the sky, was thought to be a falling star. Ray did the only thing he could to keep from despairing—he began another short story that morning. “Work is the only answer,” he said.
By early 2003, Maggie was growing increasingly and markedly wearied. She rarely left the house anymore. When she made appointments with friends, the hairdresser, the doctor, she’d inevitably cancel them. She spent her days reading and talking to her four cats, Jack, Win-Win, Dingo, and her favorite, Ditzy. From the sofa in the TV room in which she sat, Maggie could look out the screen door and marvel at her glorious rose garden, reports of which she’d rattle off to friends on the telephone.
On Halloween night, 2003, Ray and his daughter Alexandra sat at the small table in the breakfast room, carving pumpkins. As he had done over decades, Ray stood at the front door with a large bowl of candy and a Polaroid camera to snap photos of young trick-or-treaters in their elaborate costumes. That evening, Maggie was noticeably tired, noticeably frail, and didn’t come to the door to hand out treats. Two weeks later, when she could not climb out of bed, Ray dialed 911 for the paramedics, though Maggie refused to go to the hospital. When the paramedic crew arrived, they took her to Brotman Medical Center in nearby Culver City, where she was admitted. Because Maggie had skipped all her doctor’s appointments in the last few years, the diagnosis came as a shock to everyone. She had advanced lung cancer. In the days that followed, her daughters visited her at the hospital, Patrick Kachurka kept a regular vigil by her bedside, and Ray and Maggie’s dear friends, bookstore owners Craig and Patty Graham, came by with flowers and laughter. Ray stopped in each afternoon and sat by her side and held her hand and cried. “I love you, Mama,” he mustered, choking back tears. “I love you.” To the end, Maggie’s sense of humor remained. Even when she could no longer speak through the tangle of feeding tubes and the oxygen mask, if someone in the room cracked a joke to cheer her up, she chuckled, her spirit unbreakable.
On November 24, 2003, at 3:15 in the afternoon, Marguerite Susan McClure Bradbury passed away. She and Ray had been married for fifty-seven years. Like all married couples, Ray and Maggie had shared their ups and downs, but through it all Maggie had been Ray’s adviser, his staunch supporter, the love of his life, the woman who “took a vow of poverty” when she married a relatively unknown pulp writer who had nothing more than big dreams. He told her he wanted to go to the moon and he wanted to take her with him. And she went.
The funeral service, kept simple and intimate, was held on Friday,
November 28, at Westwood Memorial Park Chapel. On that day, the sun was bright and the sky was blue, the requisite L.A. smog on temporary hiatus. Ray had chosen that particular cemetery to bury Maggie because it was small, close to home, and practically a Who’s Who of twentieth-century entertainment—there lie Marilyn Monroe, Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, the original “Odd Couple,” Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon; singers Peggy Lee, Roy Orbison, and Mel Tormé. He had purchased a plot for himself, as well.
Inside the A-frame chapel, family and friends gathered—the Bradbury daughters and grandchildren, Forrest J Ackerman, Norman Corwin, Sid Stebel, Bill Nolan, Stan Freberg, and dozens more. Maggie lay at rest in her casket, a stuffed animal—a black cat—and a comic-book adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which Ray had slipped in, nestled by her side. Eschewing the traditional standard service, since they’d only attended church a handful of times over the decades, Ray invited those in attendance to share their memories of Maggie. Forrest Ackerman spoke, reminding Ray that Maggie, his wife of fifty-six years, had always “looked out” for him and was now watching from above. After a few more brief, respectful remarks from others, Ray stood to offer his own reflections. He began at the beginning, recalling his courtship with Maggie and the early days of their marriage. Those were the days he most cherished. “We were so in love and it was so wonderful,” he said.
With Maggie’s passing, Ray was left all alone in the big house in Cheviot Hills. However, he carried on and continued writing. Loss, though, seemed to be all around him. On Sunday, February 8, 2004, Ray’s longtime friend and his first agent, Julius Schwartz, died at Winthrop Hospital in New York from complications due to pneumonia. He was eighty-eight years old.
On the afternoon of April 3, 2004, Ray spoke by telephone to his brother, Skip, just as he did every Wednesday and Saturday. The last thing Ray said to his older brother was, “I love you.” Later that night, Leonard “Skip” Bradbury Jr. passed away in his sleep at his home in La Pine, Oregon. He was eighty-seven.
“Everyone around me is dying,” Ray said. Sitting in the breakfast room of his house, sunlight falling through the slats of the white wooden window shutters, Ray pondered the future. His future. Our future. He had long been respected as a visionary and he was often asked where humankind was headed next.
“We’re going to make it. We’re going to be all right. First, we’re going back to the moon. Then, we’re going to Mars. After that, we’re headed to Alpha Centauri,” Ray said, pausing for a moment to reflect. “And you know what? I’m going with you.”
And he was right. Mr. Electrico had been right, too. Ray would live forever. Through his work. As so many around him were departing, Ray found solace in the fact that he would be here long after his physical self was gone, buried at Westwood Memorial Park next to Maggie.
“The thing that makes me happy,” he said, “is that I know that on Mars, two hundred years from now, my books are going to be read. They’ll be up on dead Mars with no atmosphere. And late at night, with a flashlight, some little boy is going to peek under the covers and read The Martian Chronicles on Mars.”
For certain, this child of modern popular culture had earned his own rightful place as a central figure in the annals of twentieth-century Americana. Even the language of this multimedia Renaissance man had entered the national lexicon. In May 2004, Academy Award–winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore premiered his politically charged motion picture Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Cannes Film Festival. The movie skewered the policies of President George W. Bush that led the United States to war in Iraq in 2003. The documentary film title was an obvious homage to Ray’s seminal novel of social commentary, Fahrenheit 451. Like so many, Michael Moore had grown up on the works of Ray Bradbury. In the post–September 11 world, many readers—Moore included—believed that Fahrenheit 451, with its themes of censorship, individual empowerment, and looming government control, was now more relevant than ever before. Moore even felt that his title was carrying on a proud Bradbury tradition, of respectfully borrowing lines from classic literature for titles, just as Ray had done with Shakespeare’s “Something wicked this way comes,” Yeats’s “The golden apples of the sun,” and Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric.” But when Ray caught wind of Michael Moore’s intentions, he was upset and tried in vain to reach Moore by telephone, to ask him to drop the title. Ray wished that Moore had at least asked him for permission; Ray also worried that his novel would somehow be confused with Moore’s film. Academy Award–nominated screenwriter and director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) had recently completed a much-anticipated new screenplay of Fahrenheit 451 with the hopes of releasing the film in 2005. Ray worried that some might confuse Moore’s film with the Darabont movie. Ray was vocal to the press about his displeasure with Moore. “Give me my title back,” he stated in numerous television and print interviews. On the afternoon of Saturday, June 5, 2004, Moore finally called. The U.S. release of his film was just two weeks away. Ray was sitting in his oversized leather chair in his television room when Moore phoned. The filmmaker was soft-spoken and gentle. Ray responded in kind and suggested that they hold a joint press conference, in which Moore would hand a copy of Fahrenheit 451 back to him as a metaphorical gesture. During the proposed conference, Moore would announce that he was changing the film’s title. But when Ray presented this idea, Moore said that the film and all of its marketing had been set into motion long ago. It was too late to change the title, and Moore was apologetic that it had come to this.
When Ray’s feelings on Fahrenheit 9/11 hit the news, a firestorm ensued. Many noted the irony of Ray Bradbury attempting to censor Michael Moore. After all, Fahrenheit 451 was one of the great emblematic works of anticensorship. Ray insisted that politics had nothing to do with his feelings. He steadfastly maintained that he had no party affiliation, was not offended on behalf of the Republican Party; in fact, he said that if he were to be classified at all, he was an Independent. Ray argued that it was a matter of principle, if only Moore had called him before he had chosen the title. Ray defended himself and his use of titles from Shakespeare, Yeats, and Whitman; in each instance, in the front of Ray’s books, he had credited the respective quotes from the original authors.
Upon its release, Fahrenheit 9/11 broke records, becoming the first documentary ever to open at number one at the box office; the film grossed $23.9 million during its opening weekend alone. Fahrenheit 9/11 well illustrated just how profoundly Ray Bradbury had imprinted popular culture. In November 2004, his influence became ever clearer. On November 17, Ray received the highest national honor given to artists by the United States government. Accompanied by three of his four daughters—Susan, Bettina, and Alexandra—and Patrick Kachurka, Ray flew to Washington, D.C., to accept the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush, presented under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts.
It was a crisp, sunny autumn day. As Ray got ready to go to the White House, he couldn’t help but think of Maggie, and wish that she could be with him to enjoy this unprecedented honor. He thought, too, of his mother and father, and how proud they would have been to see how far he’d come—all the way to the White House!—from the little house in Waukegan.
Upon their arrival, Ray and his guests were escorted to the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing, just off the Oval Office, where they were asked to wait. Moments later, a door opened, and a Marine Corps captain pushed Ray’s wheelchair across a short hallway and into the office of President George W. Bush. Standing alongside the commander-in-chief was First Lady Laura Bush, along with Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and several others. Like so many people, Gioia, a renowned poet in his own right, had grown up on the words of Ray Bradbury. Gioia had personally recommended to the President that Bradbury be awarded the Medal of Arts.
“The author of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451,” wrote Gioia in the official NEA announcement, “Ray Bradbury is the greatest living American wr
iter of science fiction. His singular achievement in this genre is rooted in the imaginative originality of his works, his gift for language, his insights into the human condition, and his commitment to the freedom of the individual.”
President Bush placed the heavy medal around Ray’s neck and shook his hand. Ray smiled broadly, savoring the exhilarating moment, the apex of his decades-long career. Since his earliest days in “Green Town,” Illinois, he had always believed the future to be full of promise. And, from the Great Depression through to the Space Age, as he dreamed of the future—imagined it, wrote about, embraced it—he had inspired some of the most renowned individuals of several generations, from filmmakers to musicians to politicians to astronauts to writers. Many of them would go on to leave their own marks, to establish their own legacies, and many of them owed a debt of sincere gratitude to Ray Bradbury for being an early inspiration. Ever since he walked out of a dark movie theater in the winter of 1924, his mother by his side, Lon Chaney in his heart and his mind, Ray Bradbury was forever forged of popular culture. Now, eighty years later, he claimed the same influence on others. His impact was widespread. From a crater on the moon, to a classroom in Tokyo, to an instantly recognizable amusement park ride rising out of the Florida swampland, to a small park in Waukegan, Illinois, named in 1990 “Ray Bradbury Park,” he was everywhere. And even if he wouldn’t be a part of the future he so eloquently envisioned, he was all around us.
EPILOGUE
“Get your work done,” was one of Ray Bradbury’s favorite mantras. And he followed his own sage wisdom. Since the 2005 publication of the hardcover edition of The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, the man stayed remarkably busy. While he was mostly wheelchair-bound because of his strokes, he continued to actively lecture across Southern California. He still did book signings and, most important, he continued to write.